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Romantic Comedy
Date Published: February 1, 2015
When the normal life Ray has always dreamed of unravels, she falls for a drummer, comes to terms with her unconventional childhood, and inevitably discovers that normal was never really in her best interest.
Romantic Comedy
Date Published: February 1, 2015
When the normal life Ray has always dreamed of unravels, she falls for a drummer, comes to terms with her unconventional childhood, and inevitably discovers that normal was never really in her best interest.
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EXCERPT
The loud clanking of a spoon against a cereal bowl roused Ray
from her second slumber. Her nausea was completely gone, but it felt like
somebody shoved a few dozen hat pins into her skull. She opened one eye, and
found herself staring at someone’s bare feet.
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The loud clanking of a spoon against a cereal bowl roused Ray
from her second slumber. Her nausea was completely gone, but it felt like
somebody shoved a few dozen hat pins into her skull. She opened one eye, and
found herself staring at someone’s bare feet.
Ray had a thing about feet. Feet were disgusting appendages.
Especially hairy guy feet. The Birkenstock trend nearly made her mental. She
never even let her husband touch her with his feet. But these feet were
different. They weren’t hairy or calloused, for one thing. They were clean, for
another, and the right one had a dragon tattooed along the side of it.
“Did you clean my kitchen?”
Ray sat up, squinting with the pain of bright lights and hat
pins stirring in her cerebrum. She dug into her purse for the ridiculous
aviator shades she’d bought at the last gas station and put them on. Looking
up, she saw that the feet were attached to the drummer boy from the band in the
bar. Wavy brown hair tucked behind his ear, cobra tattoo hissing on his chest,
he wore nothing but a pair of faded jeans. Funny, had she seen this guy in the
supermarket last week, she’d have crossed the aisle to avoid him. This morning
she couldn’t take her bloodshot eyes off of him.
“Sorry about that. I’m psychotic.” She rubbed her temples,
the effort of speaking causing more hat pin sticks. “It’s just, I got up to
take some Advil, and I stepped on some Cheerios and so I tried to sweep up the
crumbs, but the crumbs were stuck because the floor was sticky…next thing you
know I’m scrubbing your floor. It just snowballed. It snowballed and thank God
I started to feel sick or I would have moved on to the bathroom, started
changing sheets while you were still sleeping in them, who knows. I clean when
I’m stressed. It’s my process.”
He smiled and shook his head, shoveling another spoonful of
Cheerios into his mouth.
“I’m Ray, by the way,” she said, removing a bobby pin that
was poking at her scalp near her temple. Holy crap, maybe those aren’t
imaginary hat pins in my head.
“Were your parents hoping for a boy or something?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’m Van,” he said, in between bites.
Van. A flicker of excitement stirred in Ray’s stomach. Might
she have stumbled upon somebody else whose parents were too high in the
seventies to properly name their child?
“Were you conceived in a van or something?”
He did a combination laugh-choke. “Uh, I have no idea. My
first name is Jeff, last name Vandermark. Van’s just a nickname. It’s easier
since there always seems to be at least three other Jeffs in any given room.”
Ray sighed. A fun nickname given by friends. She couldn’t
relate to that.
“You hungry?” he asked, pointing his spoon at his bowl of
Cheerios.
“A few hours ago I swore I’d never eat again. Think I’d
better hold off.”
He smiled slightly, and got up to pour himself another bowl.
Ray sucked in a breath. When he passed by she got an eyeful of chiseled
obliques, angled perfectly, pointing toward the Promised Land. What is wrong
with me? Escaping lunatic husband, thirty bucks to my name, dead car, remember?
Not the time to drool over drummer boys.
“Thanks for letting me crash here last night. I’d get out of
your hair, but I have no idea where my car is. I mean, I know it’s at a bar
somewhere in Portland…”
He laughed into his spoonful of cereal and nodded as he
struggled with a swallow. “Right. Let me finish eating and we can go see about
your car.”
Audra Middleton was born and raised in Washington State where she lives with her husband and their three boys. She gave up her teaching career to raise her children, and in between diaper changes and baseball games, she began writing books. Once she started, she couldn’t stop, even after she went back to teaching. Check her website to find out more about her writing projects.
Audra Middleton was born and raised in Washington State where she lives with her husband and their three boys. She gave up her teaching career to raise her children, and in between diaper changes and baseball games, she began writing books. Once she started, she couldn’t stop, even after she went back to teaching. Check her website to find out more about her writing projects.
Thanks for featuring Middle Eight today!
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